Fredrik Backman is the recipient of the 2019 Piraten Award, a prestigious Swedish culture and arts award handed out by the Fritiof Nilsson Piraten Society. Backman is the youngest author to have received the prize. The jury motivates their choice thusly:

“Since his triumphant debut, a work whose echoes still reverberate worldwide, this year’s winner has become one of our most beloved storytellers. He portrays the ordinary person and all of her hardships with warmth and empathy. He mixes humor with gravity in true Piraten spirit, and is always on the side of the weak in his depictions of our time.”

The Fritiof Nilsson Piraten Society was founded in honor of author Fritiof Nilsson Piraten and is Sweden’s largest literary society. Previous winners of the award include Peter Englund, Kristina Lugn, Leif GW Persson and Gösta Ekman. The award will be handed out in July in Kivik in southern Sweden.

Hedvig Montgomery and Jørn Lier Horst & Thomas Enger each snag a No. 1 spot on the official Norwegian bestseller lists for week 19 (May 6-12). Hedvig Montgomery is No. 1 on the nonfiction list with The Kindergarten Age, and Jørn Lier Horst & Thomas Enger’s Death Deserved is No. 1 on the paperback list.

The Sunday Times has presented a carefully curated list of the very best crime and spy novels to be published since 1945, and among the illustrious authors and titles featured are Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman and Yrsa Sigurdardóttir’s The Silence of the Sea. Nesbø and Sigurdardóttir are joined on the list by iconic names like Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming and Henning Mankell.

Lars Kepler’s The Rabbit Hunter has been nominated for the Polish crime-fiction magazine Pocisk’s award for Best Translated Crime Novel of 2018. Pocisk is the biggest magazine for crime readers in Poland, and will announce their winner during the Warsaw Crime Festival on May 18th.

Jørn Lier Horst is the winner of the 2019 Petrona Award for ‘Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year’ for The Katharina Code. This marks the second time that Horst received the prestigious award - he first did so in 2016 with The Caveman.

The jury motivates their choice of the novel and Horst with the following official comment:

“From the code’s intriguing introduction in the novel’s opening pages to the duel of wits at its end, Jørn Lier Horst has crafted an outstanding and thrilling police procedural. The judges were particularly impressed with how the author takes established tropes – the ‘cold case’, the longstanding suspect, the dogged nature of policework – and combines them in ways that are innovative and fresh. The Katharina Code is the seventh novel in Horst’s ‘William Wisting’ series to be superbly translated by Anne Bruce from Norwegian into English, and a highly worthy winner of the 2019 Petrona Award.”

Niklas Natt och Dag’s The Wolf and the Watchman has been longlisted for the prestigious 2019 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger.

Named after the iconic author Ian Fleming, the award is given to a title that fits the broadest definition of the thriller novel - it can be set in any period and include, but not be limited to, spy fiction and/or action/adventure stories. All in the spirit of Fleming, who said there was one essential criterion for a good thriller – that “one simply has to turn the pages.”

The winners of all the CWA Daggers will be announced at the Dagger Award Dinner in London, on October 24th.

Jørn Lier Horst’s The Katharina Code has been longlisted for the prestigious 2019 CWA International Dagger Award. The winners of all the CWA Daggers will be announced at the Dagger Award Dinner in London, on October 24th.

The official Swedish bestseller lists for the month of April see the repeat appearance of some familiar authorships and titles, starting with Lars Kepler and Lazarus, which comes in at No. 3 in hardcover this month. The seventh Joona Linna novel has featured on the monthly lists since October.

Next on the hardcover lists is Hjorth & Rosenfeldt’s A Higher Justice, coming in at No. 4 this April. The author duo is followed by Fredrik Backman, whose Anxious People debuts on the monthly lists at No. 5 both in hardcover and audio.

The paperback list has Stefan Ahnhem appear at No. 3 with Motive X, the fourth Fabian Risk novel. Stina Jackson nabs the No. 5 spot with The Silver Road, which also features at No. 2 on the e-book list. Jackson’s debut novel has been on the monthly paperback bestseller lists since December last year.

The award-winning Norwegian director Sara Johnsen is one of Scandinavia’s most distinguished directors and writers. In addition to penning and directing TV-series and feature films, Johnsen is the author of two novels: White Man, and He Knows Something She Can Try.

Her first feature film, Kissed by Winter (2005), received fantastic reviews, became Norway’s submission to the Academy Awards, won the Grand Jury Prize at AFI Fest and was nominated for the prestigious Nordic Council Film Prize. Her second feature, Upperdog (2009), was received with great acclamation and became a box office success. Upperdog was presented with the Norwegian Film Critics Award and became the big winner at that year’s Amanda Awards.

All That Matters Is Past (2012) had its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival and was nominated for ‘Best Nordic Film’ at the Gothenburg Film Festival.

Johnsen is currently working on 22 July, a series about the everyday heroes who took action following the terror attack in Norway on July 22nd, 2011. The anticipated series, created by Johnsen and Pål Sletaune, will premiere early 2020.

The official bestseller lists of week 18 (April 29th - May 5th) see Fredrik Backman once more claim the No. 2 spot on the hardcover list with Anxious People. The title also features on the audio and e-book lists, where it comes in at No. 3 and No. 4 respectively.

Ulf Lundell makes his debut on the bestseller lists with the just published Weekdays 2, which is No. 3 in hardcover and No. 3 in e-book.

Roslund & Hellström likewise make an appearance with their bestseller Three Hours, which comes in at No. 4 in paperback.

Simon Stålenhag’s highly acclaimed The Electric State is shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the UK’s premier prize for science fiction literature.

Named after British author Arthur C. Clarke, the award was established in 1987. The winning title and author is chosen by a jury comprising of members nominated by the award's supporting organisations, currently the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation and the Sci-Fi-London film festival.

The winner will be announced at a public award ceremony on Wednesday, July 17th, 2019.

Director and writer Jesper Ganslandt has since his dynamic debut work, the much acclaimed Falkenberg Farewell (2006), established himself as one of the most fearless voices in Scandinavian filmmaking.

Falkenberg Farewell was nominated for the prestigious Nordic Council’s Film Prize and chosen as Sweden’s submission for the Academy Awards. Ganslandt’s second feature, The Ape (2009), received great reviews, among else in The Guardian where he was declared “a new star director.” In 2018, Ganslandt opened the International Film Festival Rotterdam with Jimmie, which was lauded by the press and nominated for ‘Best Nordic Film’ at the Gothenburg Film Festival.

Ganslandt recently finished shooting the drama 438 Days, which is based on the award-winning novel of the same name by Johan Persson and Martin Schibbye. 438 Days will premiere in 2019.